Marco wipes a glass like he’s trying to climb inside it. ‘You’re a funny man, Daniel. Hilarious. You know I’ve got a weak heart, right?’

I cut him some slack with a soft smile. ‘I know, Marco. Victor’s in back?’

Marco wipes harder, not happy with giving bad news to big people. ‘Yeah. Doing his favourite thang. He said to send you back if you showed up.’

‘Those exact words?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Give it to me straight.’

‘What he said exactly was “If that Irish monkey-fucker shows up, you send him back here for a bitch slapping.”’

My eyebrows shoot up to my hairline of old. ‘Monkey-fucker?’

Marco almost disappears behind the bar. ‘Not my words.’ Then he gets brave. ‘I would probably have said leprechaunfucker, to tie in with the Irish thing.’

‘Yeah, that’s much better. Do me a favour, Marco. Pour me a large Jameson; I should be out in a minute to drink it.’

‘You got it, Dan,’ says Marco, reaching for the optic. ‘I’m gonna miss you, man.’

‘I’m getting fired, not dying,’ I mutter and head for the back room.

The back room in Slotz is the only original part of the building. Nice little red-brick room with a row of head-height postbox windows. Vic installed a polished wooden bar in the corner that’s way too big for the space, and there’s an old green baize card table with brass corners wedged into the leftover room. This is where the real money is made in Slotz. The back room has been running a high-stakes game since Prohibition. To hear Vic tell it, you’d think that every New York gangster from Schultz to Gotti had lost a bundle in here.

When I push through the door, Vic is swizzling a green cocktail and treating a couple of teenage girls to a social studies lesson.

‘The entire room is living history. This table. This exact table is fifty years old.’

The girls are nodding eagerly hoping for Vic’s approval; I on the other hand have decided not to beg for my job back. I have realised suddenly that without Connie, this dump holds zero appeal for me. So I do not have to listen to Vic’s shit for one more second.

‘Fifty years? Back home we have fast-food joints older than that. We have bloody walls older than this entire country.’

Victor jumps. He was so into his spiel that he didn’t even notice me coming in.

‘What the hell?’ he stammers, for some reason grabbing at his purple bowler hat, like that’s the first thing a raider would go for. I notice that he’s wearing a bandanna under the hat, and another stuffed into his breast pocket. ‘McEvoy! You’re like a case of the clap. You arrive quiet, then flare up.’